[TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.

[wmullett at bright.net]

You painted a pretty good mental image.  I'm sure it wasn't funny at the time but you got to laugh now.  

---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:18:11 -0500
>From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net (on behalf of Andrew Vida <osan at netlabs.net>)
>Subject: [TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.  
>To: Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
>
>So I spend all this time excavating the crawl space beneath the house 
>with nothing but a shovel and wheel barrow.  200 yards of impossible WV 
>red shale clay.  The 2' crawl space is not 10' deep and almost ready for 
>the new foundation wall.  I order about 1000' of rebar and a few other 
>bits for the work ahead.
>
>West Virginia Steel truck arrives yesterday and as it backs down our 
>steep driveway the brakes apparently have issues and the truck just 
>keeps rolling.  That length of 12" channel just kisses the house as the 
>truck comes to a tenuous stop.  I chocked the wheels and the driver 
>calls a wrecker.  An hour later the truck is halfway up the driveway, 
>chocked and safe.
>
>So what does the driver then do, you ask?  He proceeds to follow the 
>wrecker up the driveway against instruction, stalls the engine on the 
>GMC 7500 flatbed, which has no airbrakes, and proceeds rolling back to 
>the house.
>
>I am standing directly behind about 50' back thinking that this just 
>cannot be happening.  I dodged being hit by about 8 to 12 inches.  The 
>truck plows into the parked 4Runner, destroying the front end as the 
>driver attempts to avoid leveling the house, veers off to the right, all 
>this backwards, flies into the as-yet dry pond I excavated about 6 
>months ago, the back slamming into the opposite embankment and 
>decelerating the vehicle from about 35 or 40 mph to zero in well under 
>1/10 of a second.  The front wheels flew at least 2' off the ground as 
>the entire chassis bent in ways never intended, the remaining energy 
>directing the cab rightward about 15 feet.
>
>I was certain the driver had been killed, but he survived, if with a 
>goodly showing of his own blood as his head went through the back 
>window.  That the steel was not driven through the cab and subsequently 
>through the driver seems convincing evidence that someone was watching 
>over him.
>
>A small fleet of wreckers showed up and in about 6 hours they actually 
>managed to themselves get stuck in the mud, but eventually got 
>themselves and the delivery vehicle out.
>
>So my driveway is damaged from the steel chocks scraping as the wreckers 
>skidded under the stress of the cables, one of which broke 
>unceremoniously - nobody killed by the whipping cable, but I was 
>standing only about 40 feet away, thereafter increasing my interval of 
>observation.
>
>Garden nuked, car nuked, potato bed nuked, tillable ground seriously 
>nuked.  House slightly damaged.
>
>All in all, the day seemed pretty to have passed well.  Nobody killed.
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